(MintPress) – The United Kingdom is reportedly pushing ahead with new legislation that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) and phone companies to store customer activity and transaction data for one year. The data would be made available for security services as an anti-terror tactic.
The spying plan would take a hard aim at social networking websites, allowing security services to have access to who users communicate with on Facebook, direct messages on Twitter and communications from online video games. The government would not store the data, rather communications companies would be required to create databases and store the data independently.
The specific content of calls or emails would not be stored, according to The Telegraph. However, phone numbers and e-mail addresses would be kept on file. Authors of the legislation say the information would provide law enforcement with beneficial information when seeking the whereabouts of a cell phone or Internet user.
Opponents have called the measure a violation of civil liberties and a proposition that would be “ripe for hacking” across the globe.
“Every hacker, every malicious threat, every foreign government is going to want access to this,” said Gus Hosein of Privacy International.
Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told The Telegraph, “This would be a systematic effort to spy on all of our digital communications. … No state in history has been able to gather the level of information proposed – it’s a way of collecting everything about who we talk to just in case something turns up.”
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Canada follows suit
There has certainly been an increase in efforts to implement spying legislation in other countries, however. Recently, Canada reintroduced legislation that would allow the government to obtain information from Internet subscribers without a warrant.
The bill, dubbed the “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act,” would also give Canadian law enforcement access to consumer information. The surveillance law would extend the spying to ISPs and cell phone companies by requiring them to install live tracking and real-time surveillance on its devices to record data.
Canadian public safety minister Vic Toews cited a crackdown on child pornography as one reason to implement the law. Toews said those who oppose the legislation would be in support of child pornography. The bill would authorize the release of a person’s name, address, phone number, email address and name of service provider. The bill would also require companies to hand over the Internet protocol (IP) addresses.
“The point here is this can no longer be discretionary on the part of telecommunication service providers, especially when children’s lives are at stake. It’s clear we need a better system,” Toews said.
Opposition against the bill grew quickly, with an online petition garnering well over 80,000 signatures.
“The police can do this on law-abiding citizens. They don’t have to make the case that there’s been an infraction here and they go before a judge to make the case and get a warrant,” said Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner. “I have no problem with them going after the bad guys — of course not. I want them to do that. But that is not what warrantless access entails. … ”
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United States
The United States seems to be ahead of the global curve in implementing surveillance legislation. The furthest reach of phone or Internet spying in America has been the all-encompassing President’s Surveillance Program, enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks by George W. Bush.
The program ushered in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which authorized warrantless wiretaps if it were suspected that one of the parties communicating were suspected of being part of a terrorist organization. The program also implemented classified programs that were not made public, according to a report cited by the New York Times in 2009.
The New York Times reported: “The report states that at the same time Mr. Bush authorized the warrantless wiretapping operation, he also signed off on other surveillance programs that the government has never publicly acknowledged. While the report does not identify them, current and former officials say that those programs included data mining of e-mail messages of Americans.”
On the domestic front, the Patriot Act, enacted on 2001 as a counterterrorism measure, allotted for wiretapping with in the U.S. to monitor calls for terroristic threats. Critics have argued that ordinary civilians could get caught up in surveillance processes that include phone wiretapping and searches of businesses records.
An Al-Jazeera report on email and phone surveillance in the U.S. quoted the top lawyer at the National Security Agency (NSA), Matthew Olson, as saying he thought that “authority may exist” for the government to use cell-site data to track the location of Americans.
Whistleblower and former top official for the NSA, Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted by the Bush and Obama administrations, wrote in the Washington Post, “Shortly after Sept. 11, I heard more than rumblings about secret electronic eavesdropping and data mining against Americans … Before the war on terrorism, our country recognized the importance of free speech and privacy. If we sacrifice these basic liberties, according to the false dichotomy that such is required for security, then we transform ourselves from an oasis of freedom into a police state.”
Source: MintPress